Nobel Prize Winners (1958)

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. Life
itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so
breathtakingly serious!
-Boris Pasternak

Most of us are only familiar with Doctor Zhivago from the epic
David
Lean film version (indeed this is one of the books I come across most
frequently at book sales, almost always unread). The movie is beautiful
but strangely inert, has a somewhat disjointed narrative and conveys no
clear philosophical message--flaws which I always assumed were a function
of the difficulty of converting a Russian novel to film and the inexplicable
casting of two really awful actors (Omar Sharif & Julie Christie) in
the lead roles. But now, having reread the novel, it seems to me
that these weaknesses are inherent in the novel. Just as Lean seemed
most interested in the story as a vehicle for presenting cinematic images,
the real life in Pasternak comes less from the narrative itself than from
the poetry that Zhivago produces. And the message of the novel, assuming
that there is one, is presented awfully subtly.

Zhivago himself, the name means "life" in Russian, is a pretty docile
leading man. The story follows him as he is buffeted by the winds
of change in Russia from 1903 to his death sometime after WWII.
We can take at least a twofold message from the novel. Pasternak
seems first of all to be speaking out, however obliquely, against a system
which denies life and destroys artists, as the Soviet regime had.
However, he also seems to be saying that the artist is relatively helpless
against the tides of history. It is ironic in light of this that
Pasternak became such a cause celebre. A good deal of this novel's
reputation surely rests on the Western reaction to Soviet efforts to quash
it. Perhaps I've simply lost the ability to read between the lines
of samizdat, but I thought the condemnation of Communist Russia in the
book was exceedingly mild, almost too much so. And there is one section
in particular, right at the end of the book, where Pasternak waxes optimistically
over how the nation may be entering a period of renewed freedom now that
the war has been won. This kind of wishful thinking comes across
as incredibly naive. I guess I too will have to fall back on the
reaction that the novel provoked and assumed that even such feathery criticism
as the book contains was important in crystallizing opposition to the regime.

But Doctor Zhivago is understood to be semi autobiographical
and to the extent that Zhivago is acted upon rather than acting himself,
perhaps he is intended to convey Pasternak's own ambivalence about the
role he had played by remaining in Soviet Union and continuing to work.
Indeed, there is a really poignant moment in Isaiah
Berlin's piece on the author, where Pasternak, near desperation, seeks
to solicit Berlin's opinion on whether people believe that he has collaborated
with the government because he remained in the USSR or whether they instead
accept that he felt compelled to stay. In fairness to Pasternak,
it should not be necessary to leave a country (as did Solzhenitsyn) or
be disappeared (as was Isaac Babel) or be imprisoned (as were countless
others) in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of your opposition to an
evil government.

To be honest, the subtlety of Pasternak's message and our increasing
distance from the time when even such subtleties could prove incendiary,
served to deaden the effect of a novel which already suffers from being
a tad too episodic. In the final analysis, I guess I respected the
book more than enjoyed it and found it more interesting as a key artifact
of an age that is quickly receding from memory than compelling as a novel.